MultiChoice Africa proves its mettle by taking up cutting-edge technologies in digital broadcasting converged in its Command Centre, which enable the company beam clear signals to subscribers around Sub-Saharan Africa.
The Command Centre is the heartbeat of MultiChoice’s African operations, constantly monitoring the pulse of every channel on DStv and ensuring that subscribers in all the countries receive clear and uninterrupted signals. The centre’s most critical role is to ensure that things stay in sync with the complex satellite broadcasts that bring DStv channels to the continent.
Nested in the imposing MultiChoice complex located in Johannesburg, South Africa; the centre has rows upon rows of monitors simultaneously displaying all of the channels being broadcast on DStv. A massive central plasma screen can display four channels at once for closer viewing, with another six slim LCD screens flanking it. All the screens are fed from a rack of satellite decoders (more than 100 different types and models) which decipher signals, ensuring that what viewers at home see are well monitored, and down times mitigated.
In addition to these are large suspended plastic domes used to beam sound to individual operators so that they can check the sound quality of any broadcast, at the push of a button.
According to Llewellyn Pillay, manager, “the Command Centre is the centralized administration and monitoring point that ensures that MultiChoice Africa provides the best quality service to its customers. We make sure that everything goes on air as it should, and if anything goes wrong, we ensure that it gets fixed very quickly.”
The centre uses a collection of both machine and human monitors to watch video and sound quality. Any distortion or unwanted sound triggers an alert, and immediate action is enforced.
The Command Centre also monitors the Extended Electronic Programme Guide (EEPG), which is a detailed listing of every programme on all the DStv channels. For example, a movie on Movie Magic channel would have listed its start and end times, a summary of the movie’s plot, main cast and year of release.
Given the array of programming on the DStv bouquet, the EEPG helps viewers to get the most out of their subscription. The Comand Centre contributes by ensuring that the EEPG is always accurate for the programmes being broadcast at a particular time.
In addition to all these technological achievements, MultiChoice uses four different satellites to cover all of Africa alone. It was recently reported that the company reserved a space in Intelsat’s IS-20 scheduled for launch in the first quarter of 2012, which will replace the Intelsat 10 satellite and will provide services to Africa, Europe, the Middle East and Asia.
The Eutelsat W4 satellite for example, broadcasts programmes first uploaded in South Africa to be received in West and Central Africa through a satellite uplink facility in Spain. More so, the signals of the SuperSports channels face a round trip of around 70,000km to reach a subscriber in southern Africa – a distance covered in just seconds.